There is a guest post on the Faith and Theology blog today remembering John Stott, which focuses on Stott's strong belief that Christians must be engaged with the world around them. Stott would argue that Christians should follow Christ's call to be salt and light, seeking societal transformation in a world God loves.
The author of the post wonders why other evangelicals don't feel the same way. He points to something Tim Challies once wrote as a conclusion to a book review:
There is a time and a place for humanitarian work, no doubt. Christians can carry out great ministries serving the poor and the oppressed and in so doing can have remarkable opportunities to share the gospel. And yet still the history of Christianity shows that when Christians do this, the gospel quickly becomes secondary and the work itself becomes the gospel. I still see the Bible primarily emphasizing charity given to other believers; when I look at Acts and the epistles, this is what I see most—Christians helping other Christians as a sign of love and fraternity. Now of course there will be some who engage in humanitarian work outside the context of the local church, but it seems to me that the closer we come to making this a necessary part of the Christian mission, the more likely we are to see the gospel diminish.
I have two reasons for bringing this up. First, the author is right to critique evangelicalism's general avoidance of the calling Stott believed we all had. But second, he commits the error that has been committed by far too many people ever since that blasted TIME article came out a couple of years ago – he calls Challies a Neocalvinist.
Challies is not a neocalvinist. He is a New Calvinist. A Neocalvinist would never say what Challies has said above.
As I mentioned a few posts back, I've been reading John Bolt's little volume, Christian and Reformed Today. The book is available as a free PDF here. I have been plugging the book on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days because as I have been reading through it, I have come to realise how important of a book it is. If you consider yourself to be an adherent of the Reformed tradition, this book should be required reading. Bolt does an excellent job of summarising the tradition and demonstrating it to be a holistic worldview, not just a soteriological perspective. The recent resurgence in Reformed theology, specifically amongst the so-called New Calvinists, has led many to adopt the label of 'Reformed' without understanding the fullness and breadth of the tradition. Reformed theology, Bolt argues, is about a lot more than the redemption of our souls.
I may post more on this as I continue to read. Since we are in the middle of traveling and moving right now, I was not sure I would get the time to do so, but it seems I might. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, be sure to download and read Bolt's book, and spread the word. With the increasing number of people claiming to be Reformed, this is becoming especially important.
I have been reading John Bolt's book, Christian and Reformed Today (which is available free as a PDF here), and already in the first couple of chapters I have found some particularly important things regarding the trinitarian emphasis in Reformed theology. Bolt argues that, although most Christian traditions certainly claim to be trinitarian, they often focus on one person of the Trinity to the exclusion of the other two. Only in the Reformed tradition, Bolt asserts, can one find a fully trinitarian Christianity.
For the purposes of defintion, Bolt says, "A Reformed person is trinitarian in theology and catholic in vision" (21). Expanding first on the trinitarian aspect of his defintion, Bolt cites Herman Bavinck, who writes, "The essence of the Christian religion consists therein, that the creation of the Father, destroyed by sin, is again restored in the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and recreated by the grace of the Spirit to a Kingdom of God" (29). It is notable that though all three persons of the Trinity are equal, there is a logical flow that begins with God the Father and creation.
When Reformed trinitarian theology begins with the Father, this has some important implications. It means specifically that creation has priority over salvation, that salvation is not escape from or elevation above creation but the restoration of creation. It means that the most important question in life is not, "What must I do to be saved," but "How can I glorify God?" As the Westminster Catechism so beautifully states it, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." It means that the Reformed tradition places a great deal of emphasis upon the idea of vocation or calling, upon serving God in this world rather than escaping from it (28).
So we see that a trinitarian theology begins and ends with God as Creator. This means that Christianity which is fully trinitarian will understand the end goal of the Christian life differently than a Christianity which lays more or less stress on one person of the Trinity. Most common in evangelical Christianity is the tendency to elevate the second person of the Trinity, thus making individual salvation the primary focus. As Bolt suggests, when the question, "What must I do to be saved?" becomes fundamental, the Christianity that emerges becomes too narrowly focused and fails to take into account the work of God to restore his creation and establish his rule as King. The biblical narrative is framed by creation and new creation, and our faith and theology must take this into account.
Bolt continues with an explanation of the second part of his definition:
The second part of the suggested definition has already been hinted at, namely that a Reformed person is catholic in vision. The Reformed view of life in the world is dominated by the idea of God's sovereignty over the entire cosmos. Abraham Kuyper in his Lectures on Calvinism put it this way: The dominating principle of Calvinism 'was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but in the widest sense cosmologically, the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.' That is what is meant by catholicity—the Reformed vision is cosmic or universal. The Reformed person is not satisifed with the salvation of his or her soul, as crucial as that is to being a Christian. The kingdom of heaven, the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck was fond of saying, is not only a pearl of great price, the treasure a man finds in a field and must obtain at all costs. It is that indeed, but it is also a leaven and a mustard seed which grows and expands. The gospel is a message for the world as well as for in the individual (29).
The stream of the Reformed tradition that has come to be known as the New Calvinism has a tendency to hear this and levy accusations both of transformationalism and a neglect of personal piety and holiness. That is a misunderstanding, however, and I think Bolt's emphasis on the trinitarian nature of the Reformed tradition is significant in correcting this misunderstanding. The focus of Reformed theology, as Bavinck notes above, is on the work of the triune God – not individuals – in restoring his creation and establishing the Kingdom of God. In turn, the people of God are called to embody the new reality that the coming of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ inaugurates. Holiness, then, is living according to the rule of the King in every part of life.
Well aware of the fact that I said just yesterday I would not be posting again until after Easter, I could not pass up sharing this with all of you. Steve Bishop posted the following on his blog yesterday, a summary of the contours of the Neocalvinist tradition drawn up by Mike Goheen and Craig Bartholomew. Clarifying what Neocalvinism is all about is especially important because there are many misleading caricatures of Neocalvinism by its opponents, particularly those who hold to something known as two-kingdom theology, and because of the constant misapplication of the term "Neocalvinist" to the New Calvinists (men like John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, Mark Driscoll), thanks to a careless terminological error in Time magazine last year.
Neocalvinism finds its roots largely in the thought of Abraham Kuyper, who has famously said, "In the total expanse of human life there is not a square inch of which Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, 'That is mine!'" With that as its overarching perspective, Neocalvinism, according to Goheen and Bartholomew, can be further summarised further as follows:
1. Neocalvinism begins with Christ and this focus opens up into a full Trinitarian faith. 2. Christ is rendered to us truly in Scripture, which is fully trustworthy as God’s Word. 3. Christ stands at the centre of the biblical story and the good news he proclaimed is about the kingdom as the goal of history—God restoring his rule over the whole of human life and creation. 4. Since Christ has revealed and accomplished the end of history the Scriptures have a storied shape, and as such tell the true story of the whole world. 5. A central theme in the biblical story is God’s election of a people to embody the kingdom, to be a preview of the goal of history, and thus to bear witness to Christ’s rule over all of life – this constitutes mission. 6. The comprehensive gospel of the kingdom has been narrowed and consigned to a very minor place within the dominant Western humanist worldview, and this calls for a conscious articulation of a biblical worldview in relation to the cultural worldview to enable the church to recover the all-embracing scope of the good news. 7. The good news reveals the restoration of the creation from sin, and thus a neocalvinist worldview insists on a comprehensive and integrated understanding of creation, fall and restoration. 8. The fundamental backdrop of God’s drama of restoration is creation and thus neocalvinism articulates a rich doctrine of creation including its good and dynamic creation order and humanity’s place within it. 9. History is part of God’s order for creation and thus neocalvinism affirms the historical development or differentiation of creation. 10. The implication of the fall is that the power of sin and evil now radically twists every part of creation, and while the structures of creation remain good the distorting power of sin means they have been radically misdirected. 11. The Bible tells the story of restoration centred in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the recovery of God’s originally good purposes for the whole of his creation and all of human life. 12. Since God’s restorative power is at work in the creation by the Spirit, and the forces of evil remains at work in the creation, neocalvinism recognizes an ultimate religious conflict in the whole of human life. 13. God is at work leading his creation to its destiny of a new heavens and a new earth, and only then will the kingdom finally come. Until then the church is called to participate in God’s redemptive mission—the missio Dei—as witnesses to his victory, but since we await the final victory there is no room for triumphalism in neocalvinism.
While there is much more that can be said about this, Goheen and Bartholomew have here given a very helpful summary of the Neocalvinist tradition. There are many other resources available for exploring Neocalvinism further. To begin with, Bob Robinson has written a few blog posts highlighting the differences between Neocalvinism and the New Calvinism (see also here). Steve Bishop has also worked tirelessly to compile a wealth of resources from different leaders and thinkers within the Neocalvinist tradition at his site, All of Life Redeemed.
I know this is only a very short introduction to Neocalvinism, but hopefully it piques your interest to explore the tradition further. And now the next time someone tells you that Piper is a Neocalvinist, you can lovingly correct the person, give them a copy of Creation Regained, and let them see for themselves what Neocalvinism is really about.
In the past several years, I've addressed the topic of education often on this blog, both in the context of the church and of higher education. Under the influence of people like James K. A. Smith and Steven Garber, I've long been convinced that education is not simply about downloading information in pursuit of qualification for a job or career, but is about the formation of the whole person. This is equally true of our approach to education in the church and in our schools. In terms of the former, one volume particularly worth mentioning is Gary Parrett and Steve Kang's excellent book, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful.
I encountered this on a very practical level when I did my undergraduate studies at Redeemer University College, and remain so grateful for professors who understood and practised this. Much of their perspective finds its roots in the Neocalvinist tradition, where thinkers like Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd gave shape to an understanding of education that recognised the sovereignty of God over all of life, operated with a holistic and biblical concept of humanity, and that counters modernity by not letting consumerism drive education and act as its leading function. Occasionally, I find myself regretting my university years because I did not understand this well enough. I sometimes wish I could go through those four years again with the understanding I have now.
There is, of course, much to say on this topic, and I encourage you to read further on the matter. I was prompted to raise the topic again the other day when Bob Robinson posted this bit from Steven Garber's fantastic book, The Fabric of Faithfulness:
The shriveled visions of universities under the impact of modernity…seem more concerned to produce people who are technically competent but who have little interest in the whys and wherefores of the competencies.
Education must be oriented to preparation for a calling and not just training for a career. Walker Percy’s memorable metaphor captures the irony inherent in our individual and social expectations of the meaning of education when he writes of ‘the one who gets all A’s but flunks life.'
It is crucial for leaders in education to understand this as they engage in teaching and formation. They are not just facilitators to help students download information and pass tests. Students also need to stop thinking of education as just one step on the path to getting a good job, but recognise the role a good education plays in shaping their whole life.
Since this is my own blog, I'll plug the other posts I've written on the subject, which you can find grouped together under the education tag.
The March edition of Comment magazine—yes, I'm a little late in picking up on this—has three articles dealing with each aspect of the biblical story: creation, fall, and redemption. Understanding the biblical narrative in this way is characteristic of the school of thought known as neocalvinism, which Comment roots itself in. All the pieces in this three-part series are excellent, and all worth your time (as is Comment as a whole—incidentally, Comment publishes five times more material online than in print if you wanted to read it on a regular basis). A taste of each piece follows.
The first thing most people think of in connection with creation is the so-called 'natural world'—that is, the physical and biological world. We think of stars and galaxies as well as molecules and atoms, of trees and flowers as well as birds and beasts. But that is a very limited view of creation. In the biblical view, creation is everything which God has ordained to exist, what he has put in place as part of his creative workmanship. To be sure, this includes the great variety of physical entities and processes, and the enormous diversity of flora and fauna that God has created 'according to their kind,' but it also encompasses much more. Creation includes such human realities as families and other social institutions, the presence of beauty in the world, the ability to appreciate that beauty, the phenomena of tenderness and laughter, the capacity to conceptualize and reason, the experience of joy and the sense of justice. An almost unimaginable variety of objects, institutions, relationships and phenomena are part of the rich texture of God's creation.
[The fall] is the second 'act' in the overall narrative of the Scriptures, the next major theme in a biblical view of life and the world. First, there is the good news of creation, but now we have the bad news of the fall. It introduces fundamental conflict into the biblical drama, which must be resolved before God's story ends. It shows, contrary to other worldviews, that evil is not rooted in creation itself, but in the moral rebellion of the human race against the divine authority of the holy God. I sometimes call this episode the 'uncreation' because of the damage it did to God's very good world: how it twisted his intentions for humanity, for our knowing and loving and culture-making, and for all the earth.
And finally Jamie Smith paints a wonderful portrait of God's all-encompassing redemption:
Our good Creator has not left us to our own devices. While we ruptured the plenitude of creative love, our condescending God has also ruptured our brass heaven, along with our desire to enclose ourselves in immanence, appearing in the flesh—our flesh—as the image of the invisible God. Jesus of Nazareth appears as the second Adam who models for us what it looks like to carry out that original mission of image-bearing and cultivation. The Word became flesh, not to save our souls from this fallen world, but in order to restore us as lovers of this world—to (re)enable us to carry out that creative commission. Indeed, God saves us so that—once again, in a kind of divine madness—we can save the world, can (re)make the world aright. And God's redemptive love spills over in its cosmic effects, giving hope to this groaning creation.
So our redemption is not some supplement to being human; it's what makes it possible to be really human, to take up the mission that marks us as God's image bearers. Saint Irenaeus captures this succinctly: 'The glory of God is a human being fully alive.' Redemption doesn't tack on some spiritual appendage, nor does it liberate us from being human in order to achieve some sort of angelhood. Rather, redemption is the restoration of our humanity, and our humanity is bound up with our mission of being God's co-creative culture-makers.
Be sure to read all of the articles in their entirety. It is this three-part framework (alternatively construed as wonder, heartbreak, and hope) that forms the point of view from which Comment looks at the world, a point of view which, my friend and the magazine's editor Gideon Strauss writes, manifestly reveals the love of the triune God. This love "evokes—from our whole person and in unity with the whole people of God—a life of worship, a love of our neighbours, and a respectful caring and disclosure of all of creation. Lives ordered by the love of God are ordered well, and can be lived well."
Abraham Kuyper, in that oft-quoted dictum, rightly declares that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our worldview needs this truth as its foundation. We do not begin to live our lives well, to borrow Gideon's words, unless we begin with the recognition of His total claim over all of creation and His holistic work of redemption. Indeed, as Cornelius Van Til once said, "Man cannot be man unless God is God."
Foppe Ten Hoor was a Dutch immigrant to America, arriving in 1896 and within a few years assuming the role of professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There had been a large influx of Dutch immigrants to America between roughly 1850-1900 (successive waves of immigrants would arrive in the following decades as well), many of whom came out of Reformed churches in the Netherlands. New immigrants found establishing themselves in America to be a challenge—not only did many of the battles that divided the Reformed churches back in the motherland carry over to America, but the Dutch were forced to wage an entirely different (and formidable) battle against the encroaches of American culture into their churches and their lives.
James Bratt writes of this struggle in his excellent book, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture, highlighting Ten Hoor's concerns in particular regarding the gradual Americanization of both the Dutch immigrants and the Reformed churches they established. It would have been difficult to anticipate the challenges they would face in the new world, and soon the Dutch found themselves in a situation which B.K. Kuiper, a contemporary of Ten Hoor, describes as follows:
The overwhelmingly great majority of our fellow-citizens are indifferent or in part even antagonistic to these principles [of the Reformed]. Almost all educational institutions from the highest to the lowest; almost the entire press, daily newspapers as well as periodicals, not only the secular but the religious as well; our courts, our legislatures, organized politics and social life, the pulpits themselves; and therefore almost all public opinion stands arrayed in battle-order against the small circle that yet holds too and nail to the Reformed world-and-life conception.
Like many immigrants in this period, the Dutch had looked to America as a sort of promised land and had been told that there they would find a genuinely Christian land, one that had been spared the athiestic and revolutionary turmoil that had shaped Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. What they found upon arrival, however, was a Christianity that was shallow, individualistic, and concerned with consequence rather than principle.
Ten Hoor, with many other Reformed leaders, were not optimistic about the new context they found themselves in nor the influence this new culture would have on the Reformed churches. Ten Hoor noted the salient features of American Christianity:
doctrinal indifference, passion for 'programs,' impulsive innovation. Evangelicals replaced catechism with Sunday School, Bible study with prayer meetings, doctrinal sermons with topical discourses. Having sacrificed the intellectual in Christianity, they had to resort to the emotions of the ignorant—revivals—or to the tastes of the respectable—'sound organization' pleasing the businessman and 'social service' pleasing his wife. In each case they imitated 'the world,' whether or mass entertainment, of big business with its mergers and boards, or of charities with their assorted benevolences.
In his estimation, it all boiled down to subjectivity and "I-sovereignty." Americans had a remarkable disdain for authority, unless it was their own. For Ten Hoor it seemed that especially confessional authority, but even Scriptural authority, played a secondary role to the whims of the individual. The end goal in American Christianity was not God's glory, but human happiness, reflected in what Ten Hoor observed to be the basic question that animated the American spirit—"Does it pay?"
For Ten Hoor and the rest of the Dutch Reformed in America, then, the challenge was to resist the influence of American culture on Reformed spirituality and theology. How to resist that challenge, however, was a source of constant and heated debate.
This is interesting to me for two reasons. First, being the grandson of Dutch immigrants on both sides of my family, the story of the Dutch Reformed immigrants in North America is my own story. Second, having now spent several months studying the history of Christianity in America, I find Ten Hoor to be very perceptive in his assessment of American Christianity. Growing up, I often thought that the struggle of the Dutch to preserve a culture and tradition was borne out of nothing more than a lingering superiority complex (those of you who have had the misfortune of hearing a Dutchman proclaim, "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much!" will undoubtedly feel the same).I have come to realize and appreciate, however, that this struggle goes far deeper than just culture and tradition.
In the end, this was the struggle to preserve a holistic worldview that confessed the lordship of Christ over all. Granted, no unified answer ever came from the Dutch on how to deal with the challenge of American Christianity—some content to withdraw into secluded enclaves that shut the world out entirely, some taking up in earnest the cause of Abraham Kuyper and the neocalvinists to transform culture, and many in between—but there was broad consensus on the problems and concerted efforts among the different parties to address them. Recognizing that to be a Christian meant not only living as a Christian, but also thinking as one, the Dutch were often known for their intellect and wisdom in cultivating both the mind and the heart (the Christian school movement is one such example of these efforts).
The Dutch were well aware that it was a great struggle to be a Christian in this new land. Because Ten Hoor's apt description of American Christianity remains largely true for today, there is much to glean from the insights of the Dutch and their collective struggle to live in a way that acknowledged the sovereignty of God over every part of life. Be sure to read Bratt's book for a much more detailed look at the Dutch experience in America.
Henry R. Van Til (the nephew of Cornelius) is often credited with the remarkable insight, "Culture is religion externalized." However, if you read the following portion from the chapter on the relationship of religion and culture in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, you will find out that those words are actually a paraphrase of a quote properly attributed to Paul Tillich.
At any rate, Van Til makes the crucial point here that our deepest religious convictions penetrate our entire being and form the axis on which our lives rotate. Every human being is a religious being at the very core. Says Van Til,
It is...more correct to ask what the role of culture is in religion than to put the question the other way around, as Hutchison does, 'What is religion's role in culture?' For man, in the deepest reaches of his being, is religious; he is determined by his relationship to God. Religion, to paraphrase the poet's expressive phrase, is not of life a thing apart, it is man's whole existence. Hutchison, indeed, comes to the same conclusion when he says, 'For religion is not one aspect or department of life beside the others, as modern secular thought likes to believe; it consists rather in the orientation of all human life to the absolute'. Tillich has captured the idea in a trenchant line, 'Religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion.'The Westminster Shorter Catechism maintains at the outset that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. However other-worldly this may sound to some, Presbyterians have interpreted this biblically to mean that man is to serve God in his daily calling, which is the content of religion. This service cannot be expressed except through man's cultural activity, which gives expression to his religious faith. Now faith is the function of the heart, and out of the heart are the issues of life (Prov. 4:23). This is the first principle of a biblically oriented psychology.No man can escape this religious determination of his life, since God is the inescapable, ever-present Fact of man's existence. God may be loved or hated, adored or debased, but he cannot be ignored. The sense of God (sensus deitatis) is still the seed of religion (semen religionis). All of primitive religion is corroboration of the cry of the Psalmist, "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence?" (Ps. 139:7).
And it is for this reason I steadfastly maintain that life is religion. There simply is no way around it.
